Case Study: The All Singing All Dancing Music Video Playlist Manager
The Challenge
Build a solution to allow a local music venue to easily download, organise, play and manage a music video playlist on the fly to their clients, all whilst taking requests and without the need for a dedicated DJ manning the decks.
The Story
The concept for Iguana DJ arose to fit the needs of an issue a local music bar we had been working with was having, whereby they were using a combination of Virtual DJ to show video content, but having to revert to an audio only streaming service for it's remote control feature during busier times in order to deal with requests from customers without the need to be near the PC controlling the playlist. They were keen to find a middle ground, and after initially trialling the remote control add-ons for Virtual DJ and other popular audio and video applications, we decided to take up the challenge of building our own solution.
What It Needed To Do
The bar had both a projector and multiple TV displays connected to a central Windows PC, which they were using to show video content. When reverting to audio only, they were simply playing a looped video on the display.
After a thorough assessment of the client's needs, we determined that the key features the software had to acheive was:
- The ability to build and manage playlists of both audio and video content, and subsequently play them either sequentially or shuffled.
- To analyse and volume match the songs in the playlist, to avoid the need to constantly be manning the sound mixer. Fading between tracks was also a major plus.
- To be able to insert songs into the current playlist and move them around.
- To be able to control this remotely from a phone or tablet, and to be able to hand that tablet to a customer when they requested a song, and for it to be easy for that customer to search for the song and not interrupt the playlist (a big issue with other software is a customer would click on the song after they found it and accidentally replace the whole playlist)
- To be able to show the logo of the venue in a customisable location over the top of the videos.
We also determined some nice to have features such as being able to insert adverts for upcoming events over or in between the scheduled songs and being able to import existing playlists from services such as Spotify or Deezer.
How We Went About It
We had a bit of a headstart with the implementation, having written and released an audio only DJ application (Dissident DJ) several years ago, however rather than update this we decided to use this as a blueprint and opt for a reliance on only open source libraries. We initially considered using this project as an opportunity to properly dive into Rust, but ultimately decided on a combination of C++ with an embedded Python interpreter, with the latter being used to add extendable scripting and plugin capabilities to the app. Alongside this we also implemented the client UI in Javascript using the Vue framework, meaning the application could be used on any web enabled device without the need for a separate app.
Additionally because the venue needed to be able to search for songs that they may not have stored locally, we were able to extend the application to search initially through the local collection but also connect with their cloud collection as well as Deezer and YouTube Premium.
The Results
An interesting challenge arose during the implementation and testing of the application, in that the PC being used was around 10 years old and initially struggled to play HD video directly from it's ageing hard disk. Rather than opt for replacing the machine, we decided it was a good challenge to try and improve the experience and target lower end hardware. Ultimately we succeeded in this challenge through a combination of careful caching and preloading, taking care not to exhaust the limited system memory but use it's quicker read speeds to the software's advantage.
Overall the project was a huge success and remains one of our proudest accomplishments, and after several other people expressed interest in the app we decided to make the software available for free, in the same spirit as the libraries it depends upon, and continue to build upon it and add new features to this day. You can download it right now at www.iguanadj.com
